On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (11 page)

We walked along, carrying the sofa with us in Kalman’s camera, where it would join her collection of photos of spent and discarded chairs and sofas.

“Once you start looking,” she advised, “they are everywhere.”

We had thrust ourselves off the corner. The real magic of the walk happened then, when we stopped standing there and began to actually amble. With Kalman, walking around the block entered a fourth dimension.

Of course, I—and each of my fellow walkers—had been in four dimensions all along. Still, the progression of the walks was decidedly three-dimensional: always up, down, and along sidewalks. Except when disabused of this notion by my son, I had defined each walk as a straightforward journey along a path between two points, A and B, the beginning of the walk and its
end. What we manipulated was the time it took to cover that path: many of my co-walkers had slowed down to look more carefully at something underfoot or overhead. Occasionally we sped up to catch a glimpse in a store window before a shutter was pulled down, or we briefly galloped, as though someone were lighting a match to our tailcoats, to avoid becoming a pedestrian-automobile accident statistic.

But with Kalman, the definition of the space changed. She walked straight off of the sidewalks. I don’t mean she floated, in her blue canvas sneakers, hovering inches off the ground. (Though the image suits her, and matches many of her charismatic drawings that pose the subject, be it a pleated skirt or a robin, frameless on the page.) No, Kalman climbed not a tree. Instead, she veered. She abandoned the course. She left the route and wandered into buildings that interested her. Over the course of five blocks and two hours, we went off course a half dozen times. We knocked on the door of the local halfway house. We meandered into a church. We descended into a basement senior center that advertised itself as being specifically for “black social workers.” We made it into the anterooms of an odd small museum of Russian art and a Buddhist temple, only stymied by ongoing renovations in each. Eventually, we made it from A to B, but not before visiting all of the later letters of the alphabet.

Beyond this, she implicated others in our walk. We spoke to a mailman, various policemen, a couple of movers, numerous passersby who Kalman for unknown reasons thought might be able to tell us the name of the man featured in a horribly done plaster bust set in a first-floor window, folks working at the halfway house and senior centers, people entering and leaving the church, people who had simply stopped in their walking (for reasons of infirmity or tourism) somewhere near where we had stopped, and an office worker and two cooks doing work behind windows
open just enough for Kalman to call in to them and for them to acknowledge us.

Kalman’s boldness was matched by my admitted discomfort. I try, as an accredited city resident, to manage coexistence with millions of strangers by keeping pretty much to myself on the street. I had not spoken to this many people on the street in my last hundred ventures from my house. Kalman forced me, reluctantly, to remove my invisibility cloak and read the social-workers sign as though it were really inviting us in. Her frank interest in others made me think about the feeling of privacy we carry with us from our homes into public, where there is truly no privacy. I had not noticed, until forced to by Kalman’s sociability, how I was engaging in a fundamentally social activity by walking out in public.

Still, we all have a sense of the “appropriate” personal space around us—a kind of zone of privacy that we wear, even on the social sidewalk. Indeed, we have many coencentric circles of personal
spaces,
plural. The Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger, elaborating from studies of animal behavior, proposed that the personal zones around us fall into a few categories. Those with whom we do not mind “inescapable involvement”—as our loved ones—can broach the closest zone and get nearer than eighteen inches to us. At that proximity, we can smell them, feel the heat of their bodies, their breath, hear the small sounds they mutter or emit. We can whisper together. Most social interactions take place in a comfortable zone about one and a half to four feet away—closer in some cultures (Latin American) than others (North American). Friends can waltz through; acquaintances can hover on the edge. We have a social distance up to twelve feet from our bodies for more formal transactions, or for those we don’t know well. Beyond that is a kind of public distance in which we use our “outdoor” voice. All of these zones are artificial, varying with differing relationships, based on context and the physical setting—but we have a bodily
sense of the reality of these spaces. Violate them, and we may feel stressed and anxious.

Kalman minded people’s spaces, but she seemed to see
personal space
as an indication that there was a
person
in that space to engage with. Of course, the persons had to be willing to be engaged with. We make judgments about people—their trustworthiness, their intelligence, their beauty—in glances that take less than a third of a second. All those quick glances aimed at Kalman and me must have added up to many seconds’ worth of judgments over the duration of the walk. (Apparently, we were judged to be basically nonthreatening.)

These engagements and our path-veering led, ultimately, to various curious episodes. Our first foray off course was into the halfway house. It did not identify itself as such—but its entranceway distinguished it from the austere residential buildings on either side. In the vestibule there was but one sign. Not an identifying placard—at least, not directly. “Please remove your hats on entering the building,” it read.

Kalman immediately looked for an
informant.
She inquired of the weary, uniformed man sitting behind the window at the facility’s entrance about the sign’s provenance and meaning. We were clearly the first to ever so ask. He looked at us with a long, steady gaze. I looked away, but Kalman happily persisted. As they chatted, I looked around at the anteroom of the building. This space was roughly seventy feet as the crow flies from my own living room; I had never been inside. The same is almost certainly the case with all of the buildings in the vicinity of your own home. Though we become accustomed to the look of our neighborhood from the street, it is but the skin that we see. Though this building looked residential, the entryway revealed its business core: Plexiglas set off the guard’s post; the elevator was of the industrial varietal, and a handful of visitors stood in solemn observance of its
slow travel. The room was unlovely but eye opening. We went no further. Back outside, my vision was changed: I noticed that more than a usual number of people edged the tree pit outside; cigarette butts by the curb now indicated to me the presence of many people forced to go outside to smoke. I imagined that every hatless pedestrian was headed into that building, probably feeling a little naked of pate.

 • • • 

As we left, I swung around to watch the building click from its old, familiar face to this new one, informed by what I now knew of its inside. The door settled into its jamb. Through a window I could see the guard’s eyes following us. So much for being invisible. When Kalman wanted to get the guard’s attention, she looked him in the eyes. Now we were the subject of his gaze. This may seem trivial: gaze and eye contact are the most simple of acts. But they sit squarely at the center of our advanced social intelligence. There is a reason we can imagine others’ perspectives, have empathy, infer others’ goals, communicate—and it begins with a shared gaze.

It could be a happy accident of pigmentation, this interest in each other’s eyes. The sclera of our eyes lost its dark coloration somewhere on the route between chimpanzee and human. With the whites of my eyes as backdrop to my bright blue irises, the direction of my gaze suddenly becomes plainly distinct. I cannot avoid being spotted looking at you by turning to the side and sneaking a peek out of the corners of my eyes. (Not only can you see me looking, I would look sneaky.)

Even worse, as our ancestors came out of the trees and onto the plains, the entire shape of both our faces and our eyes changed. Our faces flattened: while the human face allows us to smush it fully against a windowpane or to receive a coating of pie from
a pie tosser, the monkey’s face has a prominent snout, more like other mammals. The architecture of the human face is centered on the eyes, not the mouth or nose. Our cheekbones are conspicuously high—right below the eyes. The forehead and eyebrows complete the framing on the other side. Even the nose gets in the action, serving as an indicator of where our faces are pointing. Unlike most mammals, we have highly developed facial musculature, including around the eyes and even in the eye itself. What we lost in expressive potential when we lost tails is made up for by our ability to squint an ironic half smile—distinct from a full-bore joyous grin or a grimace. Along the way, too, the shape of our eye opening got squashed, revealing more of the whites.

What pure disappointment these evolutionary developments might have been to their first bearers. Just when they thought that their attention was private, now everyone else could read it on their faces. It could be no worse if a Magic Marker traced a circle around your genitals when you felt attracted to someone, or your forehead scrolled the text rambling through your head in private thoughts.

But our ancestors dealt with this change, and it was the harbinger of the development of the so-called social brain of present-day humans—one keen on others’ faces and eyes, and on the personhood behind those features. There is no one area in the brain that organizes our social understanding; instead, it is a network of regions in the cortex and subcortex, but especially parts of prefrontal cortex, right behind our forehead. There is something lovely about how eyes, windows to the mind, are contemplated in the space nearly right behind them. But they get there indirectly: the occipital cortex, processing raw data received through the eyes, is at the very back of the head.

In that extra loop through the cortices of the brain, gaze gained meaning—lots of meaning. Gaze reveals that we are attending,
and we react physically to seeing someone gazing at us. The sympathetic nervous system, responsible for revving up our bodies to run when we spy that lion, and for calming us when we are sitting down digesting dinner, treats gaze as something of interest. It reacts in the way it would if we saw a lion—just more moderately (unless it is a lion’s gaze). Adrenaline starts coursing through us, our heart pitter-pats, our breath subtly quickens, and we begin to sweat. How we feel about that rush of excitement depends on what we think the gaze means. And this depends on context: is it our lover gazing at us (I must really love him back) or is it that creepy guy across the subway car (I’ve got to get out of here)? Fear and sexual attraction are in the head; the body prepares the same way for both.

In all events, the gaze is salient. We notice it, and we notice it from day one. Newborn babies can do very, very little when they first appear in this world, but they are already making one choice clearly. They prefer to look at a face looking toward them than one looking away. Later, this mutual gazing between oneself and others will be a way to convey a sense of closeness or understanding. Indeed, the easiest way to get an infant to smile is to simply let them see you looking right at them.
³

From those first gazes on, we look at the ones we love, and we tend to love the ones we look at. Or those who look at us: researchers have found that in a controlled setting, we like unknown people who gaze at us more than those who do not. When we are in an audience, we are delighted by eye contact with whoever is on stage. Not only do we rate them as better speakers or performers, we think they are stronger, more competent, more attractive, and more credible.

Unless they stare. A fleeting glance can, if it is less fleeting, turn sinister. The gaze of a stranger is unwelcome. Even the gaze of an oil painting can be disconcerting. Part of the animacy of Renaissance portraits is that the eyes seem to follow you, half-flirting and half-glaring as you shyly try to duck out of its gaze. It is the cues of the face that cause us to feel this way, since they never change: if the subject’s eyes are locked on the viewer’s from one vantage, they will always be so locked, wherever that viewer goes.

 • • • 

My solution to get out of this eye lock with the building guard? Walk out of his view. A block away, though, Kalman found the senior center, another place to enter. I had passed this place for years and never more than glanced at it. A few short stairs later and that story was changed. We walked through heavy gun-metal doors that looked too heavy to be propped open by the wooden shims at their feet. The room beyond was certainly a public space—its sign and open doors indicated that—but not a beckoning one. As we entered, we took on the mode of visitors to a church: quiet observation, neither talking nor conspiratorially whispering together. Inside, there were established games of bingo underway;
O47
and
N4
excited a number of players to dutifully stamp the array of cards laid out in front of them. The walls were decorated with admonishments and instructions. One hand-stenciled sign told us that lunch was $1, a bargain on the west side of Manhattan. A man’s onion-chopping cadence sounded like it might be a Ping-Pong game, and Kalman’s face brightened at the possibility. A connection between Ping-Pong and onion-chopping was thereby forged in my brain. We watched the onion performance, were handed an “Activities calendar” by an employee, and aged fifteen years before we decided, by mutual head nod, to turn back to the street.

Approaching an intersection (a
corner
), we slowed, instead of hurrying, when the
Don’t Walk
sign blinked at us ominously. Getting stopped allowed us to notice the miscellany that was hanging out at the corner all the time. I learned from my son how much happens when you are waiting for the thing that is supposed to be the big event. He never complains about waiting for the subway: simply the platform provides thrill enough, with trains screeching and zooming by, flashes of lights and rumbles underfoot, swells of people entering and exiting. Kalman slowly passed a line-up of newspaper bins, considering each one as though they were displayed for sale at a flea market. I followed the arc of a tossed crumpled paper bag that failed to pass the lip of its target huddled by the streetlight. Together, we gazed, bemused, at a sign giving instructions for the
Walk/Don’t-Walk
street-crossing signals for pedestrians (weren’t they self-explanatory?).